20 Days Of Web Testing > Cross Browser

Why?

There are a growing number of browsers entering the market (including those for tablet and mobile devices) which means your website under test needs to be working well for your supported browsers.

The existing mainstream browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) are also updating themselves very frequently and often without the end user being aware of the update.

This makes testing against this growing number of browsers essential but also increasingly more time consuming.

As with all testing though, ensure you check what is supported and what isn’t by your own product/company. One of the most successful ways to reduce browser testing is to stop supporting older browsers. This is a good strategy for some companies, but not possible for all.

It obviously doesn’t make these old browsers bug free (or even guaranteed to work) but it does mean you can ignore potential problems with these older versions and focus on the version you actively support.

How?

Spread The Risk

One approach could be to run your everyday tests against a mixture of browser environments.

For example, you may be testing a simple web application where the user can log in, generate some reports, send the reports and then log out. The system also has a simple “management” system where sys admins or managers can view who is changing what.

To get a wider coverage you could test your log on functionality in one browser, test the send report functionality in another browser and then the audit trail functionality using a third browser.

This is an effective way of covering different combinations of browsers at the same time as doing your day-to-day testing. The above example won’t highlight a bug with the audit trail functionality in the first and second browser though. So there are plenty of gaps for bugs to slip through, however the time it saves may make this a good option.

Let someone else do it

For appearance issues there are many online tools like Browser Shots, which will load your page in any of the supported browsers (they support a great many versions), take a screen shot and then make these screen shots available to you.

This is great for websites, but applications that require credentials or have a huge number of pages are somewhat more difficult. It will also only check for look and feel issues.

The Browser Shots homepage

Check against standards

You could validate your site against an HTML standards checker. Checking against HTML standards will give you more confidence the site works across many browsers, but there are still some browsers that will render pages differently.